


Un coeur rempli de chagrin, les mains remplis de regret

by Amand_r



Category: Orange is the New Black
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-23
Updated: 2013-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-05 17:19:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1096506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amand_r/pseuds/Amand_r
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Burset ran the tips of her fingers through Poussey's hair.  "Ain't got no lice treatment, so we have to shave it, girl."</p><p>Poussey shrugged.  It wasn't the worst thing she'd lost by now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Un coeur rempli de chagrin, les mains remplis de regret

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tooth_and_claw](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tooth_and_claw/gifts).



> Notes: I know this is all gonna get jossed in the next season, but I don't care. You asked for more Poussey, so I did my humble best to think of something I think is apt. Also, I squee that Samira Wiley (Poussey) wants most to do a scene with Kate Mulgrew (Red).
> 
> Please forgive my fumblings with dialogue. It is very very hard to do that show justice.

1\. 

She'd known that she was in trouble when the guard had looked up from her admission form and stroked his mustache. "Pussy? Your name is pussy?"

"Poussey," she said automatically, without even thinking. "It's French."

"Well lah dee fucking dah, hip-hop," the guard said. "French pussy Washington."

She hadn't said anything after that because that was the kind of stuff that got her in trouble, fighting the wrong kind of battles, and her latest loss had landed her here. So she blinked when they took the picture, and now her ID had her with these fucked up closed eyes like some sort of retard, but hey, it wasn't like she had to look at the fucking thing.

Sometime after they'd stuffed her in a dormitory looking room with a bunch of other new inmates, someone had looked at her shoulders and winced. "You got bugs in your hair."

Poussey had been at county ever since her trial, and before too, because she wasn't going to be getting any bail, and her cellmate had been scratching at her hair the whole three months they'd been together. Poussey had asked her lawyer to have her moved, but that shit wasn't happening. Her lawyer was some pasty faced man who hadn't even been sure of her name most of the time. 'I keep confusing you with another client,' he had said, and she'd replied, 'Yeah, you all look alike to me, too.'

Her lawyer hadn't gotten her moved.

So two days after she'd gotten to Litchfield, the mustache guard—the other prisoners called him Porn-stache—had snagged her out of the breakfast line and made her walk three feet ahead of him down into the prison salon…barbershop…thing. Then, missing breakfast, she'd sat in a chair to wait for that thing –they called her Burset—to get back from breakfast. 

Burset ran the tips of her fingers through Poussey's hair. "Ain't got no lice treatment, so we have to shave it, girl."

Poussey shrugged. It wasn't the worst thing she'd lost by now.

 

2\. 

"Poussey Washington," said the guidance counselor from behind the folder. She lowered the folder and looked at Poussey. "You're going to graduate this year, Poussey?"

"I never seen you before," she said, sitting back, because it was more comfortable that way. She wasn't showing much yet, but her belly was harder, like she had a board or something in her pants, and sitting back was just better. "So you don't care until now, right? When I'm a problem?"

"You're not a problem—"

Poussey chewed her lips. "I stay here, and go to school, you keep LeVaughn off my ass?" The last thing she needed was that mutherfucker bothering her about his fucking baby. She'd told him to wear a condom, and he'd said he was, but she should have checked. Asshole.

"Do you want to transfer to the Pregnancy School?" the woman said.

Poussey thought about it. She'd heard that they pressured you to transfer. She'd heard all kinds of things. All her friends said, anyhow, after she had the kid she wouldn't want to come back anyway, even though her mom was going to watch it for her after work so she could do her homework and shit. 

"I heard they sew like, pillows and blankets and some shit over there."

The guidance counselor sniffed and looked at the wall calendar, a bunch of smiling white kids from Loyola University under a banner that said something stupid about learning. "It's quilting, and it teaches about geometry." She tapped the folder on the desktop. When Poussey rolled her eyes, she added. "They have home ec classes too, to teach you nutrition, cooking—"

"I know how to fucking cook," Poussey spat back. "I know how to make fucking beurre blanc."

The guidance counselor sat up, her eyes finally boring into Poussey's face appraisingly. "Have you given thought to what you're going to do after school?"

Poussey stared at the woman, and her stomach twitched a little. "Yeah, well."

The guidance counselor reached behind her desk and opened a drawer, rifling through a mass of papers. Poussey picked at her nails. She was gonna give this another minute and then she was going to leave. 

"Your grades aren't that good, " the counselor said over her shoulder, still looking for something. "I mean, you'd have to work on that, and with the baby…you might want to go to the pregnancy school anyway and get your GED there…ah!" The counselor yanked a paper from her drawer and swiveled in her chair, slapping the paper, or rather a brochure, down in front of Poussey on the desk.

Culinary Institute of America.

Poussey leaned forward to the first time, and the baby inside her did a little flip.

 

3\. 

"What can you possibly do for me, eh?" Red said, tossing a potato back at Nichols. "You cut away too much."

Poussey stuffed her hands into the pockets of her sweatshirt. "Well, I know how to sauté and make sauces. 'Fore I was in here, I was gonna start at the Culinary Institute—"

Red waved a hand. "You've been here what, six months? You ever seen any cream sauces on your tray?" She turned and stirred the big pot of what Poussey could tell from experience was pea soup. "I have no use for sauciers and knife skills."

Nichols looked up from her pile of potatoes. "I want some fucking knife skills," she mumbled.

"Then practice," Red snapped. She turned back to Poussey. "I don't have a need for you, and if I start letting you in, everyone else who knows how to fry a chicken leg will be at my door." She pulled off her cap and tossed it onto the counter. "No, you'll have to make do with janitorial duties or whatever it is."

Poussey didn't mind arguing. She was good at arguing. But Red had already turned away and disappeared out the back, to where the Neptune's truck was already starting to unload. Nichols shrugged at her and waved a knife. "Seriously, I need some mad skills."

There was nothing to do then, but shuffle off and head towards the rec room. She'd finished her shift a half hour ago, and her new roommate had some sort of projectile vomiting thing. She thought about going to the library, but the place was impossible to understand—everything was misfiled, probably because the redneck that ran it didn't have all the letters of the alphabet memorized in the right order. And the copy of Julia Child there was missing pages 123-367.

Prison smelled funny, like desperation and stale Pall Malls. Some days, Poussey played a game in her head called, "What would you do for a cigarette?" and usually ended up deciding that anything she'd have to do to get a cigarette here wouldn't have been worth it (mainly fucking Porn-stache).

But she had managed to get half a bag of Lay's and had traded it to Black Cindy for three uninterrupted hours of the Food Network, even though the other woman had stuffed one of the chips in her mouth and said, 'Oooh, bitch, you know I got the high blood pressures.'

So the first hour had been Emeril and Ina, and then that fucking skinny ass Italian woman with the boobs and the name like Giardia. Poussey didn't much care for her, or Sandra Lee, who came next, but she guarded the TV like a bulldog, with Cindy's help, because Martha was on next, and while Poussey didn't give a fuck about making table centerpieces with used diaphragms and pretzels, Martha was going to make her own seafood sausage, and Poussey wanted to see it.

Martha was pretty good at her thing, a self-made person, Poussey knew, but the kind of 'self-made' that America loved—the self-made that had enough money to make it in the first place. Poussey thought about all unfiled completed loan paperwork in an evidence box somewhere mixed in with exploded bags of heroin and weed. 

Martha tied off a sausage with some sort of organic, biodegradable twine that was probably fifteen dollars an inch at Whole Foods. The technical process had been entertaining, but when Martha lifted it to show the camera, her white-ass smile looked like something she'd bought at a jewelers'. But it was a self-made as she was.

"It's a good thing," Martha said to the camera.

"Fuck you," Poussey muttered.

 

4\. 

Poussey stacked the boxes in the corners and dusted her hands, only a little worried when they came away covered in dust. This heroin was packaged badly, and Jervase had run into it a few minutes, knocking the stack over. Now there was junk on the floor and on her hands. She didn't know what heroin did on skin contact, but she had a five-year-old and who the fuck knew what that did to people. The last thing she needed was an OD'd kid at the free clinic when her living room was full of fucking hard drugs.

And weed, she thought as she steered Jervase into the kitchen. Don't forget about all that fucking weed.

LeVaughn was over in Jersey City, picking up another load of dope, apparently another whole suitcase of heroin, enough so that he could pay off Shaquan and that Mexican asshole he owed. 

Jervase ran around the room with the paper plane she'd made for him out of an old flier for church services. He clambered up on the back of the couch and jumped onto the cushions, stepping on the milk crates that doubled as a coffee table, his tennis shoe slipping on the stacks of colored brochures for The Cordon Bleu and The CIA over in Hyde Park. Poussey shook her head and let him go. Now was not the time to think about cooking.

It was never the right time to think about cooking. She'd been thinking about it for the past six years, actually, filling out application after application, getting it signed by her bosses as she moved from one restaurant to another. But she never sent them, just tucked the envelopes into the back of her drawers and figured she'd be ready someday.

The bedroom was less a separate room than an alcove and she went in there to finish packing, absent-mindedly yanking the stack of sealed envelopes out from their hiding place and tucking them in under her jeans in one of the trash bags she was going to use as a suitcase. 

As soon as this shit was out of here, she was going to pack up herself and Jervase and move the fuck out. LeVaughn would be pissed, but he wouldn't go for her if her mom was around, and in any case, she'd noticed that more and more he was hitting like a pussy—all flail and no force. It might have been the junk he was putting into his arm or the beer he was putting into his belly. She wasn't sure.

Either way, she thought as she folded another pair of Jervase's patched up pants, she was out of here. She should have done this years ago. She knew what it was like out there for her, and her mom had said that she could stay there as long as LeVaughn was away, and then she'd gone over to the Bronx law center and asked an intern there to draw up a restraining order for LeVaughn. Poussey hadn't gone over to get it, but just knowing that it was there made her calmer, more all right. Like this was something that wasn't her fault. 

If the law said that she was okay, then she was, right?

All she had to do was wait for LeVaughn to get back with the rest of the junk, give her some 'spending money,' and she could wait until he was passed out to leave with Jervase. She was gonna tell him that they were going to the laundry, all their clothes in plastic bags. LeVaughn didn't even know how to wash a plate, let alone a pair of socks.

There was a knock on the door that ended in a pounding, and she hadn't even turned towards it when someone shouted on the other side, "NEW YORK CITY POLICE DEPARTMENT!"

 

5\. 

'The Bare Necessities' from the Jungle Book was playing, and, after the first few seconds of dancing and singing, everyone had sort of stopped and watched the screen, where the bear and the little boy were running around in the jungle, being free and eating pears and shit. Poussey was thinking about what it was like to eat whenever you wanted when Healy appeared in the doorway and called her name, crooking a finger towards the office. 

"Oh, she in trouble now," Cindy mumbled. Poussey handed her bag of microwave popcorn to the new girl, Taystee, and warned her not to be eating it. Healy would make her throw it away it she took it in there. 

Healy wasn’t her favorite person, but he was all right, as long as you weren't gay, or Burset. He didn't like Burset. Poussey hadn't been fond of her either, but Burset always shaved her head for her free of charge because, she said, she was usually adding hair to people's heads and not taking it off. And she had really nice cocoa butter that she rubbed into Poussey's scalp.

Healy waited for her to sit down in the chair, and then closed the door of his office. He kept the blinds open, probably because he didn’t want any implications of sex or anything, _as if_ Poussey would even think about it. But he sat heavily in his seat and took off his reading glasses. 

"I got a call from the NY coroner," he said. "You mother passed away last night." He folded his hands and looked elsewhere. as if he didn't want to be having this conversation with her. "There was some sort of cardiac event," he said, reading from a post-it note." He looked up at her. "Your sister is taking care of the arrangements." 

Poussey knew that she was supposed to say something here. She was supposed to ask questions. She was supposed to ask lots of things that Healy probably didn't know, seeing as how he'd just tossed the post-it in the trash, having read everything that was on it.

"Well, was there—"

"I don't know anything else," he told her. "You can call your sister later, I guess."

"Can I—can I go to the funeral?" Poussey said, wondering what the deadline was before she started crying. Hopefully, she had a good five minutes. "I mean, my mom is dead."

"No, sorry, inmates aren't allowed out for funerals."

"But—"

"This isn't the Hilton Head," Healy said, slipping the folder into a pile of others. That was what she was always reduced to—a folder in a pile of other folders. "You're serving time as punishment for a crime."

"But she was my mom," Poussey said, wondering what would happen to Jervase now. Her sister would take him, yeah, but she had three kids of her own. She'd never get to see him now.

One of the other inmates scuffled past the doorway, singing under her breath. _"Look for the bare necessities, the simple bare necessities, forget about your worries and your strife."_

"I don't make the rules," Healy said, which was the International shut down of her life. No one made the rules, not her lawyers, the guards, her bosses, her teachers, her guidance counselors, or the fucking asshole bus driver who had never let her on the bus with a stroller. 

One of these days, Poussey wanted to meet this person who made all the rules. She had a few things to say to him or her. Oh hell, it was probably a him. Wasn't it always?

She offered something hand wavey and silent to Healy when he started to say that he was sorry again, because she knew he wasn't. If he was sorry for all the shit that happened to everyone in here, he'd have hanged himself in a fucking closet somewhere. 

The rec room was still pretty quiet by the time she got back. She had thought about stopping and crying in the bathroom, but that crazy bitch was in there screaming at Satan, and the other stall didn't have a door. Her roommate was probably still puking into the trashcan, so she couldn't kick her out. If she had access to the cleaning supplies closet, she might have used that, but it was locked. 

She slumped into her chair and stared at her sneakers. They were dirty. When she'd been a kid, she'd always wanted really really white Keds, and her mom had lived on cup o' noodles for three months so Poussey could have a pair at Christmas. Three days after she'd gotten them, she'd spilled spaghetti sauce on them at school. 

"What?" Cindy said to her when she just looked at the TV and didn't even complain about grown-ass women watching cartoons.

"My moms died," she said. 

Taystee paused a moment before hitting Black Cindy in the back of the head. "Turn that fucking TV to the Food Network."

Emeril was making bouillabaisse, and Poussey found that she didn't even care.

 

6\. 

"The thing is," Richard Bailey, public defender, said to her from across the folding table, "you were in the room when they came in. You had it all over your hands. You're lucky they're not charging you with child endangerment."

"It wasn't mine. It was LeVaug—"

Her attorney sighed. "No one's seen him since you were picked up. " He leaned in conspiratorially. "It's been two months. He must have heard and gone into hiding." The look in his eyes suggested what he thought about that.

Poussey didn't have energy to deal with _that_ bullshit. The day before, her roommate had tried to scrawl 'Beetlejuice' on their cell wall with her own blood, and the guards had made Poussey clean it up after they'd dragged the crazy bitch away. But she was tired and raw and missing her family.

"Look, did you get the police reports? I filed them charges—"

"You filed domestic abuse charges, twice, which you then recanted," he said to her, shuffling her file, flipping it open and haphazardly rifling through her life. "I can make the argument that you were bullied into trafficking because of the domestic abuse, but it's hard when you had it all over you, you were obviously _working_ with it—"

"My kid ran—"

Mr. Bailey raised a hand. "Bringing up your son is something we want to avoid. You do not want to remind the jury that you had a five-year-old in the room with thirty pounds of heroin and over a hundred pounds of marijuana."

Poussey sat back and thought about that. If she had been on her jury, she would have been using the 'bitch please' face at herself by this time in oral arguments. She stared at her nails, wondering when she'd let them get so raggedy. Her mother would tsk at her and give her a nail file; nail files were not something they liked to give you in here.

"There has to be something—"

Mr. Bailey closed her file and looked around, as if he was checking to see if they were alone. Maybe he was gonna tell her to hide in the outgoing laundry cart.

"I think you should plead out," he said. 

"But—" 

"—If—" Mr. Bailey began, and then laid his hands flat on her file, sliding the papers this way and that, as if he was massaging the answer out of them. " _If_ we can convince the judge that you were coerced by an abusive husband—"

"Boyfriend."

"Boyfriend, then," he amended. "If we can convince them that you feared for your life, and your child's life, then we could get you a shortened sentence."

Poussey felt something settle in her chest, less of a feeling and more like a sound, the sound the bars made every night when they locked into place, a heavy metal latch thunking down on an internal catch. 

"You think this is the thing we should do?" she whispered. "I mean, what could I get?"

Mr. Bailey shrugged. "If we lose, distribution of heroin is like, thirty years, at the worst. You could get fifteen if you used the abusive boyfriend defense." He sighed, and closed her folder, slipping it into his briefcase, which was just a Jansport backpack that had seen better days. "If you were married to him, it would have been better--"

"How many if I plead out?" she asked, thinking about Jervase. Her mom would take him, but she wouldn't be able to bring him to visit very often. She could be fifteen years without seeing Jervase outside of a visitation room. By the time she got out, he'd be a man.

"I could get you five, seven tops," Mr. Bailey said, zipping up the bag, but stopping and reaching back in to pull out an envelope. "I want you to think about it overnight, Ms. Washington," he said, "because we can go to trial, but I think you'd be better off with the deal. Oh, and this came in your forwarded mail," he said to her, handing over the envelope.

It wasn't heavy, but as she looked at the return address, her stomach fell and her hand suddenly felt the texture of the paper, its weight, and the pressed nature of it, so that it looked like it was made of woven material. Mr. Bailey helped to escort her back to her cell and she sat down on the bottom bunk, staring at the walls. Everything still smelled like bleach. At least her crazy roommate was gone.

The envelope burned in her hand. Her mom must have mailed them when she picked up Poussey's trash bags of clothes at the apartment after the raid. Poussey used her ragged nail to pick at the seam on one corner, and then dug her finger into it, slicing through the top fold just like she would devein a sardine. 

The paper inside the envelope was no less heavy, pressed, official, commanding. Mutherfucking rich and cream colored. 

_Dear Ms. Washington,_

_We are pleased to be able to offer you admission to the Culinary Institute of America! We will be contacting you shortly to discuss appointments for financial aid and class scheduling!_

 

7\. 

She hadn't been sleeping well at all, between Cindy snoring on the other side of the wall, and her roommate still heaving her internal organs out just as Poussey would start to drift off to sleep. She pounded the shit pillow with her fist and thought of things she should have said the last time her mom had come to visit.

_Look, I want to thank you for taking care of Jervase for me. I know I fucked up, and I know you tried to help me out of that mess. I'm sorry that dad died. I know that ain't my fault, but I know you work really fucking hard, and I haven't been a help these last few years._

_Thank you for the Keds, and the cooking thing. I don't know what I would have done without you and dad to teach me that shit._

_Tell Jackie that I miss her, and her kids._

From there it devolved into this long missive that was less like a deathbed speech and was more like a letter to her mom on the outside, all the things she wanted her mom to do and say to the people out there.

_I feel real bad that I let down Mr. Kim, because he was a good boss, and let me mess around in his kitchen after hours, and maybe if he's still there when I get out, he'll be nice enough to let me have my job back._

Cindy let out a huge snore and her roommate's hand flopped down over the side of the bed, hitting the half-filled trash can and knocking it over. The smell of puke wafted over even though nothing fell out of the can. 

There was a flashlight somewhere down the hallway, and Poussey closed her eyes and turned her head towards the wall. Heavy footsteps were trying to be quiet but kind of sucked at it, like the guard's feet were just made of something leaden, incapable of stealth. Better that you hear them, coming, actually, so Poussey couldn't think that was a bad thing.

She could see the light through her slitted eyes, so when it stopped at her cubicle, she tried to simulate the deep steady breathing of a person who was in REM sleep. There was the crumple of paper, like a list was being checked, and then she heard her name.

"Washington," Porn-stache whispered, something he wouldn't have bothered to do if he had been there with any official authority. For a second, Poussey pretended that she didn't hear, but then there was a boot tapping her mattress, and she finally gave up., She'd be getting up whether she wanted to or not, so might as well open her eyes.

"What?"

"Come on."

"For what?" She knew she was treading water here, but there was no way this was right, was legal. If he wanted her to fuck him, he had the wrong sister. 

Porn-stache made his lips a thin line. "Get your fucking shoes on and get your ass out here," he told her, his voice still harsh and low. "Don't make me ask again."

Poussey didn't need to be told twice, even if the first time wasn't so much asking as telling. She stuffed her feet into her tennis shoes, grabbed her sweatshirt and followed him down to the end of the darkened ghetto. They turned out of the dorm and ambled down the dim hallway. A few inmates mopped the floors and wiped surfaces down. Poussey once thought about doing the night shift, but she figured that she'd get lonely. 

They were heading towards the cafeteria, and she wondered if he was gonna make her mop it again, just like she'd done the day before, probably while her mom was having a massive stroke in the hospital. Had she been scared? Had it hurt?

But he led her past the rows of tables and chairs, nary a mop bucket in sight, and into the kitchen in the back, where Miss Claudette was waiting for them. Claudette pulled a wad of bills out of her bra and slapped it in Porn-stache's hand. 

"If something happens here—" he started.

"If something happens here," Miss Claudette interrupted, "You never saw it or heard it."

"Yeah, it don't work like that. It'll be my ass on the line."

Miss Claudette glanced at Poussey and raised an eyebrow. "I think we'd have to make a bigger effort to cause trouble," she said, and fixed her withering gaze on Porn-stache.

The guard shoved one of his hands in his waistband, stared hard at Miss Claudette, then at Poussey. The he raised two fingers to his face and pointed at his eyes before turning them to Poussey. "I see everything," he said, but it was some halfhearted bullshit. And then he ambled out of the kitchen, his keys jingling on his belt. 

Miss Claudette washed her hands, and then stood in the center of the prep area, eyes studying Poussey. "My mother died when I was on a boat to this country," she said.

Poussey shuffled her feet and tried not to lean against the wall or the table. "Yeah, that's sad," she offered, because it was, and it was obvious that Miss Claudette, who rarely ever said anything to her, was making an effort. 

"Well then," Claudette said, turning away and starting to pull big containers from their shelves and remove the lids. "We don't have a lot of things, nothing fancy, and nothing very good. But here—" She reached inside her bra and pulled out a key, then bent down to drag a metal security box out from under one of the prep tables. She looked up at Poussey, and she might have had a kind of secret look on her face, like, 'we all in on this together', but Poussey wouldn't admit that she couldn't figure the old woman out. 

"Look, man, that guard is gonna be back here any minute, and we're not supposed to be here, so—"

"He won't be back," Claudette said, swinging up the lid and stepping to one side so that Poussey could look inside. 

Nothing but spices, the kind that she hadn't tasted since she'd gotten here: Mexican vanilla, cumin, garam masala, kosher salt, cayenne, cream of tartar in a little plastic bottle. A few bags of what looked like dried basil and oregano. 

She reached out and picked up the bottle of vanilla. When Claudette didn't yell at her, she unscrewed the lid and raised it to her nose. Real. None of that imitation shit. This was the real deal. She knew that Red got things in through delivery, but she had no idea it was this kind of shit. 

"Breakfast starts prep at five, serving at six-thirty," Claudette said, shoving her hands in her pockets. "You have my hands until then, and then the others will be in at six to start set ups." 

Poussey looked at her. "You want me to cook breakfast?"

"Mind the sugar," Claudette added, "it has to last for the rest of the week, and the ground beef, but I doubt you'll want that," she added.

Poussey tilted her head and squeezed the bottle of vanilla in her hands. "No, I don't need that."

Claudette reached out then, and with the rusty unused practice of touching, patted Poussey on the back. "It's all yours."

Poussey set down the bottle and pulled one of the huge tubs to herself across the table, prizing the lid off with a tentative hand, and then dug her fingers into it. She ran her hands through the cornmeal, soft and silky in her hands, a little rough ground, but dry and sure and something familiar. 

She turned to Miss Claudette then, who waited with her hands folded in front of her. "We got real eggs?"

Miss Claudette let the corner of her mouth quirk up in a little smile, and she nodded.

 

8\. 

"What is this shit?" Pennsatucky said as Norma handed her the breakfast tray. The slots were filled with a small cup of some kind of fruit, cut in little shapes, not the fruit cocktail that came out of a can. The main reservoir was layered with a yellow pudding, then some sort of ham-like meat, a white steaming mess, and then a pale yellow sauce over top that was dotted with diced tomatoes. Norma gave her a little smile, and Pennsatucky was smart enough to know that she wasn't getting an answer, so she sidled away and passed the other white group. 

"It's a poached egg," Nicky told her as she sat down at another table. Lorna gave her a wan smile and leaned down to smell her hollandaise sauce. 

Pennsatucky rolled her eyes. "It's _prison_ , not the fucking Cracker Barrel," she shot back.

"I think it's nice," said Lorna, scooping up a mouthful and turning her spoon upside down just before she closed her mouth on it. Nicky's lips twitched. 

Taystee sat down at a table and poked at her plate. "Those grits? I ain't had grits in like, forever."

"Fucking corn oatmeal," Nicky mumbled.

Poussey opened her eyes when she was halfway through her coffee. She couldn't eat anything she ever made, but she did like to see people eat it. 

She hadn't slept. Miss Claudette had left her at six to get a nap, but she had move from place to place, stirring, tasting, smelling, rolling with her hands, every settled and finished component some sort of eulogy that she could create out of shit and hell and crap into…well, whatever this was.

All the cornmeal they had, and they didn't have cornstarch. They didn't have brown sugar, but they had molasses. They'd had plenty of margarine, but barely any butter. Poussey substituted what she could, worked around what she had, thought of more and more ways to make something else, something more.

Three hundred plates of benedict, a hundred crepes, a fourth of them sent down to the guards, because why the fuck not. Healy had passed her with a plate and nodded his head, lifting it gently. Porn-stache hadn't said anything about pussy when he had taken a serving, just poked it with a finger and then stuffed it in his mouth, eating over the industrial sink in the kitchen. 

There was a thump and the table shifted, and Poussey looked up from her coffee to see Suzanne across from her, plate of eggs benedict set squarely in front of her. 

"You know," Suzanne told her, cutting her eggs and polenta with a knife and fork, her pinkies up. "I had shit like this once at _wd~50_." She ate with her fork turned under. Poussey sipped from her plastic mug and wondered, not for the first time, what the fuck was wrong with Suzanne. "Or might have been _Le Veau d'Or_ ," she amended, her eyes staring off into space. "I never remember those places, because they all smell the same, like money and desperation." She nodded, as if she'd decided something. "Yeah, desperation. You know?"

Poussey had limited experience with Suzanne, and she knew enough to say, "Yeah, I hear ya."

 

Red turned away from the archway and headed back into the kitchen towards her office. She passed Claudette, who was smiling at the stainless steel worktop and pulling all of the peeled potatoes—perfectly peeled and sliced potatoes—from the water they'd been bathing in. It was killing her looking at those potatoes—they were supposed to be cubed for mashing, but Poussey had scalloped them, and Red wanted nothing more than to be able to bake them with eggs and cream and cheese, deep long dishes of rich food like she hadn't had since she'd gotten here. But that was too much of everything they had, and she'd let the girl use more than she should have already.

Claudette was pleased with herself, as tired as she was, sipping her coffee and lazily glancing from her hands to Red, who stood there and sighed at the prep work that she hadn't thought she'd see on the inside.

"I can't hire her," Red told Claudette. "Can't let her in here with the rest of them." She unlocked the gate to her office and stared at the plate of cold crepes and fruit artfully arranged on her desk with a paper towel folded in what was probably supposed to be a swan. She had to admit it, she thought as she flipped one crepe open to see that she'd whipped the milk to make whipped cream, the girl had a gift. 

It was a damn shame.

END

**Author's Note:**

> "Un coeur rempli de chagrin, les mains rempli avec regret", a heart filled with grief, hands filled with regret.


End file.
